Tangential Ramblings

Our 50 litre Brabantia bin is broken. The catch with which the lid snaps shut no longer snaps, so the lid flips back up again. So I went to their website to order a new catch - the bins are guaranteed for life, so it wasn't a problem. However, the website's welcome message read as follows:

Please stand-by while the page is loading.

I think there's an errant hyphen in there; I don't have a stand-by button.

Coincidentally, in the supermarket tonight, I picked up some bin-liners. In doing so, I had to use some basic geometry to work out my needs. The Brabantia liners (expensive) gave a diameter measurement; the Sainsbury's liners (cheaper) gave a circumference measurement. My knowledge of pi means that the Sainsbury's liner fits snugly.

Today saw the first 10km run of my training - the race is only five weeks away. It was the first time back on the road since a week-long cold last week. My route was actually 9.82km (according to Map My Run), which I completed in 47 minutes. A couple of blisters were my biggest nightmare; stamina doesn't seem to be a problem. I need to shave a bit off that time to make it more respectable, though. I did swear (fucking cock, if I remember rightly; my Mum would be proud) at a dog owner in Battersea Park who decided to throw a ball in my path. The ball posed no threat; the ball-pursuing Alsatian was more narrowly avoided. His owner's argument that it was a park, not a running track faded to nothing as I pounded towards Albert Bridge.

En route, I also passed a speed camera on Grosvenor Road, designed to catch those quick off the mark at the Vauxhall Bridge lights. I was running in the opposite direction to the trap, but it still flashed, despite there being no traffic at the time. I can only assume my lightning speed sent it into confusion.

Finally, an advert in today's Metro for the tat this is the Daily Mail read as follows:

Would you admit to losing your virginity on television?

Surely you wouldn't have to; most people would know, right? With which verb is on television associated?

My wife's first big crush was allegedly on Virgil Tracy. According to his profile, Virgil "possesses a demeanour and maturity well beyond his years", and is an accomplished graduate of the Denver School of Advanced Technology. He never places technology above human needs, and is a fearless, complex young man with iron resolve.

I'd like to think that I share some of his characteristics. For a start, I support the Denver Broncos.

I myself have little time for Virgil, as the vehicle that he piloted, Thunderbird 2, was dreadfully designed, and I was always surprised by its ability to become airborne. I believe its toy equivalent was made out of lead, or at least a lead composite, meaning that it could do some serious damage to furniture and other objects that chose to get in its way.

What is it with some people that they feel compelled to sign off emails by preceding their name or initials with a minus sign.

It seems to be a techie thing, as Francis and Enda both do it. Actually, thinking about it, Enda signs off "/e". Also, the meebo pop-up message today was from Elaine, or should I say -Elaine. There are other examples out there, but I can't think of the culprits right now. Not sure if it's limited to the unwashed techie masses. Maybe it's some Unix joke that I don't get. If so, good. Can anyone explain?

-dan

Even though it does exactly what it says on the tin, August Bank Holiday Monday is pretty weak. The naming of our holidays isn't particularly inspired, what, with May Day and May Bank Holiday Monday (also known as Spring Bank, which I assume is short for Spring Bank Holiday Monday) alongside it.

Must try harder.

I stumbled upon little.red.boat from a BBC article about blogging. Lovely little site. This little quote from this article tickled me.

There is no 'bad' language. I mean, there are bad apostrophes, but there is no such thing as 'bad' language, is there?

I agree wholeheartedly. Maybe I'll be more forthcoming with my swearing in blogland moving forward. Ah, bollocks.

Not much to report of late. Yesterday was our second wedding anniversary, which was a nice milestone to reach. I guess the anniversary passed at 17:30, given that we married in New York at 12:30, in a nice little chapel on Lexington and 40th Street.

Next, some guy has decided to exhibit photos of over 2,500 meals and snacks that he ate during the course of 2005. I couldn't be bothered, but here's tonight's dinner, a fantastic roast chicken with sides of roast potatoes, peas, cauliflower, broccoli topped with gravy.

I've always struggled with the concept that the volume of a cube with unit sides has a unit volume, whereas a cube with sides two units in length has a volume of eight. I completely get the maths, but it just strikes me as odd.

We watched Bugsy Malone this morning. Not sure I've ever seen it all the way through, but it's a good little film. There was a song called You Give A Little Love some which seems to switch mid-way through (much like the Pet Shop Boys' Where The Streets Have No Name.) The latter half seemed very familiar, but I'm not sure why. Anyone?

I've been out playing pool tonight. A few points worthy of note.

First of all, my best pool is played after two pints and before three pints have been consumed. If I were to enter a competition, the evidence would compel me to lager-up beforehand. During this period of this evening, I won ten frames on the bounce.

Next, we played with numbered balls, as opposed to reds and yellows. (I'm a traditionalist, and reds and yellows are just wrong.) When racking the balls, however, I mentally think of the spots (solids) as red and the stripes as yellow. So I sequence through the balls such: red | yellow, red | yellow, black, red | yellow, red, yellow, red | yellow, yellow, red, yellow, red. (Or vice versa if I start with a yellow/stripe.) My brain processes a red as a spot and a yellow as a stripe. Odd.

Finally, the odds of randomly throwing the 15 balls into the triangle and having them land perfectly formed in the official pool layout are one in 12,870. I just worked it out. (Actually, I originally had this at 25,740, but Gavin worked through the numbers with more rigour than I did in my drunkenness, and I've had to halve this due to my only allowing for two of the four possible arrangements. These can be described as "Red at the front, red behind on the left", "red at the front, red behind on the right", "yellow at the front, yellow behind on the left", "yellow at the front, yellow behind on the right".)

I've categorised this as sport. Argue amongst yourselves, if you will.

I had lunch in All Bar One today. Inside, there was a sign on the floor that said "Thank you for not smoking beyond this point". On the reverse of the sign was an identical message. Without intending to, I think they've made their entire bar no smoking.

There was an article in today's Metro (and so no doubt the weekend news) about the sorry educational state of today's school-leavers, and the need for them to grasp the basics of maths and English, including useful stuff like percentages.

The fact that a higher percentage of people each year are achieving the top grades is undermining the currency of school qualifications. This year is the 24th successive year in which the A-level success rate has gone up.

A Metro-published letter from Platteen Tsang (no doubt a recent A-level success story) suggests that critics of this are "jealous of the teenagers' performance". I have to disagree.

In my view, the examination boards themselves need to use applied knowledge of percentages, assuming they have such knowledge of course. Given that the overall intelligence of the population isn't likely to change significantly from one year to the next, and given the importance of a stable currency in the field of education, wouldn't it make sense if across the country, the percentage of papers receiving a given grade for a given subject were standardised? The top 15% of A-level English papers should receive an A, for instance?

That way, each grade would measure its recipient against his or her peers, as opposed to against an ever-sliding and ever more meaningless scale.

Advert on Channel 4.

The Charlotte Church Show, Cwming soon.

Nice.

Coke's impressive GTA ad.

And some huge efforts to create a fabulous Firefox crop circle. Thanks to Rob at Dry the Rain for highlighting both.

I went to a Portuguese restaurant with my mate Bal last night. On what I think was a Spanish MTV channel, there was a Spanish rendition of Jason Donovan's Sealed with a Kiss, which struck me as a bizarre song to cover.

And while rushing through Oxford Circus tube station the other day, an announcement came over the tannoy saying the following:

Ladies and gentlemen, please note that the next announcement may be in Slovakian.

Firstly, it struck me as odd for London Underground to be considering Slovakian translation. Secondly, I was wondering whether the announcer's uncertainty was because a regular English announcement might squeeze in before it, or because he genuinely wasn't sure that it was Slovakian.

On a completely unrelated point, I was mistaken for an Architect in a meeting the other day. I'm pretty sure that's a first, and it's probably a last.

It took me a while of reading Matt Cutts' blog to realise what SEO stood for: Search Engine Optimiser. That's someone who actively tailors their site to ensure maximum traffic without doing the naughty stuff like generating invisible content and presenting different content to search engines than to users. Essentially, they're trying to ensure that if someone searches for anything remotely resembling their content, they come high in the listings.

While I understand the benefits of this to the commercial sites, I myself have neither the time nor the energy to bother with this. If people stumble upon the site, then great; if not, then hey.

I've been pestered of late by Gavin at work to communicate to the world at large the fact that dogs don't get red-eye. Quite an interesting fact, but not one that saw me running to the keyboard. Anyway, apparently dogs rarely get red-eye in photographs; instead, they get blue-, yellow- or green-eye. Here's the science.

Apparently, if the eye was perfect, none of the eye-colouring effects mentioned above would happen. The retina of the eye would perfectly reflect the camera's flash, it would end up reflecting back into the flash, and none of the associated light would enter the camera's lens. The reality is somewhat different.

The red is apparently the reflection of the flash from the blood vessels at the back of the eye, and lighter-coloured eyes exhibit the behaviour more than darker eyes.

Most domestic animals have a reflective layer at the back of the eye (the tapetum) which enhances nocturnal vision. The colour of the tapetum is dependent on the colour of the animal's coat, and it is the colour of the tapetum that determines the colour of the reflection, as opposed to the blood vessels that us humans have. Black labradors' tapeta are usually green; cocker spaniels' are yellow; most puppies have a blue tapetum before the eye becomes fully mature.

You heard it here first...

I've recently upgraded my mobile phone deal to enable unlimited internet and data access. As well as allowing me to keep abreast of news and check my email, it also allows me to post to my blog from wherever I choose.

Expect even more ramblings and mindless drivel from this point onwards...

Over the past two years, one month and one week, I've made 560 posts, attracting 568 non-spam comments. (This is post 561 if you're keeping count. The fact that it has ID number 620 in the URL is due to futzing around with test posts, mistakenly hitting the refresh button resulting in the same drivel being posted twice, etc.)

It's quite comforting that the latter number is higher than the former, even though it's a close-run thing, the comment/post ratio currently running at 1.016. It's comforting even when you get what can only be described as death threats from the likes of Mario.

I read a few other people's blogs, and hate it when I encounter something that I've decided to call comment wanking. This is when commenters have nothing to add to the discussion, but so rate the author and so want to be associated with his/her work that they decide to comment nonetheless. Matt Cutts' recent post about product hierarchies has thus far attracted 53 comments, including wanking from Josh, Matt Whelan, theGypsy, Dave (Original) - many times over - the list goes on.

There's an interesting article called Where am I? on A List Apart this month. It's intended as a "back to basics" look at navigation.

I agree with the basic tenet on which the author, Derek Powazek, bases his discussion. The past/present/future ethos is simple yet powerful: where have I been, where am I and where can I go next?. It seems like an intuitive model for navigation.

Whether past is actually interpreted as past behaviour or what's structurally behind you is something that many sites have struggled with. Should your context be based on the route you've taken to get to where you are? Or should it be based on the information architecture of the site? I firmly believe in the latter, as it gives all users the same context, and brings with it a sense of stability. You aren't presented with different signage on the fifth floor of John Lewis depending on whether you took the lift straight from ground, or got the escalator up from four; nor should you be.

However I think the guideline to never, ever link to the page you're on is wrong. (The site on which the article sits flouts this rule, btw.) Irrespective of where I am within a site, I am comforted by the fact that clicking the logo will take me to the homepage. Even if I'm on the homepage at the time, I want, and expect, this behaviour. The same is true of primary navigation. Although this functionality may appear redundant, it brings to the user a sense of consistency and comfort that shouldn't be overlooked. The fact that it's easier for content management systems to do this is by the by.

My Grandpa John used to have disdain for the human voice in the musical context, arguing that it wasn't an instrument and should be banned from music altogether. (I'll always remember that one of his favourite pieces of music was Johann Strauss's vocally bereft Blue Danube.)

I have to disagree, although he's no longer around to defend his stance. I love vocals in music, and they often make an otherwise conformist piece of music come alive.

On a related point, my housemate Glen used to harp on about the qualities of Bruce Springsteen, and this argument fell on my deaf ears for our three in east London. After over seven years with my wife, similarly obsessed by the man from New Jersey, I'm coming around to the argument. He's done some gems, and his vocal style certainly lends credence to my side of the vocals argument above.

Monopoly breeds contempt. In my twelve year career to date, I've worked in a number of organisations, and this has often rung true.

Once the contract is signed and the sales effort is over, it's often the case that the A-team goes off to the next sales venture, while you're left with the B-team to deliver against the contract. And depending on the terms of that contract, there's often complacency, the supplier safe in the knowledge that the contract allows them latitude and mediocrity, and is not designed with superlatives in mind.

There have been exceptions, but this seems to be the norm. It's true of advertising and marketing in general, it's true of the IT industry, and it's true of both the private and public sectors, although the scale of contracts in the latter may make it more prone to abuse.

One of the primary reasons for the complacency is the lack of competition. The contract binds you to work with a certain supplier, and if you want that thing delivering, it's often a binary decision you have to make: Yes/No.

It seems much more appealing to have two (or maybe more) suppliers, each working on equal terms. For any piece of work, you ask the suppliers to put forward their proposals, allowing you to choose and run with the most appealing one.

The Petronas Towers were built by two separate companies, each responsible for its own tower. Watching the documentary on their construction, I couldn't help but feel that this competition was healthy. It inspired innovation, thinking outside of the box and going the extra mile.

Surely the same would be true if an organisation had more than one chosen IT provider. There would be additional effort put into the upfront define/design activities (now that multiple companies do this piece rather than just the one), but this drawback would be outweighed by the fact that prices would be competitive, levels of effort would be commensurate and solutions would be innovative.

It's not often that you think of an idea, and find that exact same idea implemented. Thanks to Rob at work, I've found exactly that.

Basically, while out running, I've been thinking how useful it would be if you could plot your run on Google Maps and find out the distance. Map my run does exactly that. Here's the 3.77 mile run (6 kilometres) that I've done a few times now to get me back into the training regime. It's taking me about 28 minutes, which equates to around 46 minutes for the 10km. I need to build my stamina, and quicken the pace a little over the next few weeks.

Probably not vegetarian, right? Today's the first time I've mentally dissected the term and just realised how horrible it is. Previously, it was a term with no meaning apart from "good for joints". Now, it's oil drawn from the liver of a cod. Lovely.

There was a guy doing the Times 2 crossword on the southbound Northern Line this evening. The clue for seven down was In abundance; seven letters. His answer: pleanty.

Enjoyment obtained from the troubles of others. Highlighted by Mr. Bond today.

Surely it should be 'til death us does part, rather than 'til death us do part. The thing doing the parting (death) is singular. You could read the sentence: Until death does part us.

Thoughts?

A couple of things have taken me by surprise on the Strand of late.

The other lunchtime, a lady came up to me seemingly at random to ask: "Have you ever played ping-pong?"

I'm not sure why, but I lied and responded "no". To which, she asked whether I'd like to play. Again, I responded "no".

Today, two teenage girls walking behind me were attempting to sing Oasis' Don't Look Back In Anger in two-part harmony. It wasn't tortuous, but it wasn't good. And it grated against the grit of the original.

I've always found it difficult to picture spaces when quoted as square footage or square metrage. I saw a vacant shop this morning boasting 1,800 sq. ft. of space. I'm not sure whether that's a lot or not.

The first thing I do when I have to picture such a space is to picture a suitable layout. So, if the shop was 25 feet wide, then it would be 72 feet deep. Ah, now I get it.

It would be much more useful if the measure quoted was the length of the side of the space if the space was a perfect square. So in the above example, it would be quoted as 42.4 feet. So if the property was square, it would be 42.4 feet by 42.4 feet. (Better still, 12.93 metres.)

It's much easier to picture a space 42 feet square than one totalling 1,800 square feet. As an aside, I often picture 42 feet as seven people (all taller than myself) lying end-to-end. So now, I have a picture of seven people lying down one side of a shop and seven people down the adjacent side. Much easier to get my head around.

It's a word I'm pretty sure I've never heard before. I heard it for the first time on Thursday (from my boss's boss), and read it for the first time today on the BBC's Editors' blog.

Diaspora: the dispersion of Jews outside of Israel from the sixth century B.C., when they were exiled to Babylonia, until the present time.

A truly awesome little feature. Up in the top right corner, you may have noticed my new 'ping me' module courtesy of meebo. Thanks to Mark for highlighting this ("Oh - I like this meebo me thing. a portable chat window on your blog. NICE."), and to Rob for further extolling its virtues.

Basically, you can now ping me directly from my blog, so long as I'm online. Schweeeet!

Some random thoughts and observations for you.

First of all, the dot that sits proudly at the top of a lowercase 'i' is called a tittle. I find it quite nice that there's a tittle in the word tittle.

Secondly, the only street in the UK on which you drive on the right-hand side is Savoy Court, a private road coming off the Strand that leads up to the front of the Savoy Hotel. I've known that for a long time, but only now do I pass it on a daily basis, on the way to work.

And finally, I was thinking how much more useful pint glasses would be if they had a square corner. They'd be taller, and would have the shape of a quarter-circle when viewed from above. Two hands could then easily carry two, three or four pints, and the square corner might provide a pleasing contour for the hand.

Lastly, construction of the Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889. Not particularly interesting, but secretly amusing to me.

That's all for now.